Why we started swearing

A new book explains the origins of filthy language

Four-letter words, expletives, obscenities, insults, curses and cusses—there are almost as many euphemisms for offensive language as there are swearwords. But why? How has bad language retained its emotional valence in an increasingly liberal and secular society? Why do people still cringe when someone drops an f-bomb in front of a grandmother, or, worse, a toddler? These questions form the basis for Melissa Mohr’s new book, Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing. Mohr traces the history of English swearing back to its Latinate roots, through the Middle Ages, Reformation and Victorian era in order to explain its modern-day instantiations.

And she does so with good reason. Swearwords are now the most commonly used words in the English language—studies by psychologists such as Paul Cameron and Timothy Jay show that the average speaker uses expletives at least as often, if not more so, than pronouns and prepositions. In our language words like fucking, goddamn and bloody are unique in that they have a dual linguistic function. In addition to referring to specific objects and actions, they can also act as emotional intensifiers.

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terence patrick hewett

May 30, 2013 at 22:57

Simply a matter of fashion: "arse" is featured regularly in Foxe's Actes and Monuments. The "C" word is featured in Chaucer. My appallingly white Victorian and Edwardian cockney family used to sing an obscene parody of the George R Sims music-hall song “It was Christmas Day in the workhouse” together with another based on The Lost Chord by Arthur Sullivan. When the word Victorian is used today it comes with all sorts of baggage; the assumption is that we all know what Victorian means: hypocritical, preachy, introverted, un-enlightened and sexually repressed. This is erroneous: in reality the world in which we live is still fundamentally the world which the Victorians and Edwardians reformed from the horrors of the 18th century; and into which the forces of delusion are trying, with great success to drag us back. The myth of alleged Victorian prudery is no better described than in the myth of the piano legs draped to prevent the male of the species going mad from sexual lust. The legs of the furniture at the time were gussied up for good practical reasons. Since they had no refrigerators they had many larders, so they kept cats to control the mice: ipso facto they covered the furniture to stop the cats from sharpening their claws on the legs. Additionally, since they had large families it was a protection against damage to the legs of the furniture by all those wheeled wooden toys. The myth actually arose from Captain Frederick Marryat's 1839 book, Diary in America, as a satirical comment on prissiness. No-one took this seriously at the time so they must be laughing their heads off at us from above. Most of our views of the Victorians are now obtained from contemporary text; what they really thought was never committed to paper, although some idea may be got from Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, Morrison's A Child of the Jago, The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith and the pronouncements of Miss Marie Lloyd. The works of Mr Peter Ackroyd of East Acton also come highly recommended.

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